Note on all expansions: Every part of FFXI takes an enormous hit in my ratings for existing within the god awful, unconscionable interface, code base, and general design philosophies of FFXI. These things are the foundations of the whole game, and thus no expansion can fully escape these sins. Despite this I have chosen to log them all separately because they are each different beasts.
RoZ feels like part of the base game, and in North America apparently it was. It carries forward the same style of long, globetrotting, dungeon diving quests with scant few scraps of story in between. What little there is to the main story looks good on paper and was ambitious for its time, but removed from that era just about all of RoZ's characters ring hollow, and the plot beyond its sheer premise is very simple.
That's not inherently negative. It's perfectly fine to have a light and simple story, even in a Final Fantasy game and especially in an MMO. Besides, beefy extensions to the originally barren nation storylines add quite a bit more. Is it worth putting up with the gameplay to see these stories? No. It's still really, really not... but we'll keep reevaluating that as we go along.
Where the player will find their entertainment (if they find it, of course) is in the grandiosity of the quests and dungeons. It is quite common for RoZ to task the player with reaching the bottom of a huge new table-topily designed dungeon by demystifying its inscrutable laws. As a solo player in 2023 this led to me spending an entire day suffering in the miserable bowels of a Tonberry temple... but does that not qualify as "an adventure?" Much like many of the base game World of Warcraft quests, RoZ succeeds in feeling "epic" in a way that newer entries in the genre seldom ever do, but then again newer entries in the genre include basic game design and usability that are COMPLETELY absent here and aren't built around wasting hundreds upon hundreds of hours of your time. So yeah.
RoZ feels like part of the base game, and in North America apparently it was. It carries forward the same style of long, globetrotting, dungeon diving quests with scant few scraps of story in between. What little there is to the main story looks good on paper and was ambitious for its time, but removed from that era just about all of RoZ's characters ring hollow, and the plot beyond its sheer premise is very simple.
That's not inherently negative. It's perfectly fine to have a light and simple story, even in a Final Fantasy game and especially in an MMO. Besides, beefy extensions to the originally barren nation storylines add quite a bit more. Is it worth putting up with the gameplay to see these stories? No. It's still really, really not... but we'll keep reevaluating that as we go along.
Where the player will find their entertainment (if they find it, of course) is in the grandiosity of the quests and dungeons. It is quite common for RoZ to task the player with reaching the bottom of a huge new table-topily designed dungeon by demystifying its inscrutable laws. As a solo player in 2023 this led to me spending an entire day suffering in the miserable bowels of a Tonberry temple... but does that not qualify as "an adventure?" Much like many of the base game World of Warcraft quests, RoZ succeeds in feeling "epic" in a way that newer entries in the genre seldom ever do, but then again newer entries in the genre include basic game design and usability that are COMPLETELY absent here and aren't built around wasting hundreds upon hundreds of hours of your time. So yeah.